Yesterday we finally got around to decorating the Christmas tree. This means that we (and by ‘we’ I mean Richard) climbed up into the attic and pulled down all the boxes of Christmas decorations. We would have done it last weekend, except that we were both still feeling pretty worn out from being sick, and it was enough of an effort to drag the giant Christmas tree box down, let alone all the rest of it.
While Richard was up in the attic, he also got to go chase down Sherman, who now has figured out how to climb ladders (oh joy). I hadn’t been too worried because the only chairs in the room with the attic ladder pull-down are rocking chairs, and every time he’d get onto the back of one and reeeeach out to the ladder, he’d get one paw onto the step and then the chair would rock back and he would lose his balance. Plus the first step of the ladder is really high off the ground, so I didn’t think it would be an issue. Hah. I really ought to know better by now, shouldn’t I. I came back into the room from carting another box out to the dining room, just in time to see a small fuzzy grey cat scaling the ladder, already too high for me to grab him from below. My laughing cries of warning alerted Richard up in the attic, who then managed to snatch him mid-bounce (before he could do more than set one paw into the exposed insulation, which thankfully is *not* the fiberglass type, or else a certain small grey puff would have found himself getting a bath afterwards), and then he passed Sherman back down to me.
Anyway, all of this is a long way to say that yesterday we put a whole bunch more cat toys on the giant cat toy in the living room (aka we decorated the Christmas tree with all the inexpensive, nonbreakable, cat-friendly ornaments that I’ve been acquiring at the after-Christmas sales ever since we got Rupert and Ingrid four years ago and discovered we had tree climbers).  So while I have been camped out in the living room the last few days, knitting, occasionally I have been distracted by the rustle of someone ‘stealthily’ climbing through the branches, and the sight of a small furry face occasionally peeping through, paws reaching out to whap at an ornament, and now, *now* it finally is starting to feel more like Christmas around here.
‘Tis the season for Holidailies.